Protecting privacy in an era of smart police

Published: Thursday, February 05, 2015

The California Department of Justice convened a forum on “smart policing” technologies.

The evolution of surveillance technology has changed the landscape of how police, emergency services and governments do business. The collection of massive amounts of biometric (physical) data also has raised privacy and civil liberties concerns.

On Jan. 21, the California Department of Justice convened a forum at the Milton Marks Conference Center in San Francisco for advocates, law enforcement, government officials and academics to discuss how law enforcement is procuring and using “smart policing” technologies, how local communities are addressing related policy issues and how to develop best practices for balancing the need to keep our communities safe with the essentiality of respecting privacy and protecting civil liberties.

The first session provided information on all of the technologies that are being used, their benefits, and the privacy and civil liberties risks associated with each of the technologies. Robert Morgester, California Senior Assistant Attorney General and head of the state’s eCrime Unit, and Jennifer Lynch, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, presented and discussed a wide array of surveillance technologies, including:

Physical security information management (PSIM) – software that provides a platform and application to share information from multiple unconnected security devices and use them with one comprehensive user interface

Range-R – radar that is used to locate someone within a building

In addition to these surveillance tools, most police officers today have radios, smartphones, tablets and/or computers in their patrol cars.

These technologies give law enforcement an investigative edge, but they also pose some real privacy and civil liberties concerns. For example, ALPRs read thousands of license plates per minute and the numbers are uploaded into a police database, enabling police to track vehicle (and motorist) location. Automated license plate readers have the potential to create permanent records of virtually every place any driver—including the innocent—has been. Because each jurisdiction determines how long the data is stored, retention policies are all over the map.

Advocates also raised concerns about mobile fingerprint readers. In Los Angeles, local police cruise streets where day laborers gather and collect their fingerprints with mobile scanners. The day laborers consent because they do not want to seem uncooperative. The data collection opens them and their families to becoming targets for future searches and investigations.

Attendees agreed that surveillance and other technology enhances the way that law enforcement does their work and that it also helps them to coordinate with emergency services and government. However, participants expressed concern that there should be a public process for procurement of these technologies in order to keep the data secure, community engagement in developing policies for its use, transparency in implementation procedures, and a willingness from law enforcement to understand that they are sitting on a stockpile of highly sensitive data that could be badly misused.